Featured photos

Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

Asia

Market crash

It's days like Monday that reassure Tony Hann he was right to avoid stocks in mainland China.
The severity of an 8.5 percent drop in the Shanghai Composite Index is bad enough, but what irks him the ...

Canada-Australia relations

Few countries enjoy as long a history of friendship and shared endeavour as Canada and Australia. It is not by chance it was to Sydney, in 1895, that Canada dispatched its first trade commissioner, nor that Australia entered into diplomatic relations with Canada over 75 years ago, at virtually the same time as with the United States.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that the world is a better place than it was 25 years ago, given that we’re fed a daily diet of bad news. Civil wars. Terrorism. Water shortages. Earthquakes. But for children and women, it is. And it’s worth celebrating that the past quarter-century has been an extraordinary period with some tremendous successes.

British Columbia has extensive historical, cultural and economic ties to Asia. Consider that about 28 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s population is of East or southeast Asian origin. Ethnic Chinese, who account for 17 per cent of the people living in Metro Vancouver, have been a fixture in B.C. since the first wave of immigration was triggered by the gold rush in the mid-1850s.

In a laboratory deep in the heart of the UBC campus, a group of researchers are breaking seemingly normal concrete blocks with high-tech equipment, pulling, twisting and dropping them, again and again. These grey blocks, some as small as a Rubik’s Cube and others as large as a section of a bridge deck, fill the warehouse-sized facility within UBC’s applied sciences quarter.

Four former senior officials from four separate provinces — including three former provincial ministers — said the visibility of Canada’s financial and trade prowess in global markets leaves much to be desired, and policy and business leaders need to push the “Canada Brand” more aggressively abroad to make up the gap. The group was speaking Tuesday at the Pacific Finance & Trade Summit at the Vancouver Convention Centre. The panel, which included former B.C. finance minister Colin Hansen, told a crowd of 200 attendees that while Canada’s banking stability and expertise are respected worldwide, the recognition it receives globally isn’t proportional to its merits.

In signing a much-awaited memorandum of understanding and two major agreements with Pacific NorthWest LNG on May 20, the British Columbia government made good its promised support for the company’s proposed project to produce liquefied natural gas in northern B.C. for export to Asia.

It truly is a unique site. For some, it’s a dangerous development, capable of unleashing further friction in a region already wracked by growing tension. For there, in the South China Sea, an enormous flotilla of Chinese ocean dredges have been creating an artificial island where no island previously existed.

Premier Christy Clark and her B.C. Liberals are going all-in to develop liquefied natural gas, agreeing to lock in provincial royalties, taxes and regulations for decades in an effort to persuade a Malaysian-led consortium to invest billions in B.C. The first of those agreements was signed in Vancouver Wednesday by natural gas minister Rich Coleman and a representative of the Pacific NorthWest LNG consortium and released at a press conference afterward.

As a journalist fortunate enough to travel the world as a profession, I am often asked about my favourite countries. When I put Taiwan near the top of my list, people reply: “Oh yes, Bangkok, I’ve heard it’s lovely.” That’s nice, except that Bangkok is in Thailand, which has some civil strife to deal with but is not on the front line of the next Cold War. Taiwan could evolve into a new Vietnam showdown.

Canada finally ratified the international treaty to ban cluster bombs this week. It is the 90th state to do so. It took six years to do it and it happened only after chiding from Canada’s former chief negotiator for the treaty and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Martin Lee is an unlikely freedom fighter with his well-cut suit, posh, British-accented English and quiet reliance on his Catholic faith and the rule of law to guide his struggle for democracy. Although he’s now 76, the founder of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party remains on the front lines.

Life has been a whirlwind for Stewart Beck, president and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation, for the past five years. After being posted as Canada’s consul-general to San Francisco in 2009, he expected to have a few years of relative peace in Northern California.Instead, Beck was uprooted a year into the job and named Canada’s high commissioner to India, where he spent the past four years representing Canada in the world’s most-populous parliamentary democracy. The complexity of the political, social, cultural and economical nature of India proved to be quite an experience for Beck, who now brings that perspective to the Foundation as its lead executive. Beck, who took office at the non-profit think-tank in August, has spent 30 years in Canada’s diplomatic service. With stops in cities like Shanghai and Taipei, and a posting as director general of Canada’s North Asia bureau in the Foreign Affairs Department in Ottawa, he brings an on-the-ground perspective on Asian economies — and, more importantly, where Canada fits in the big picture.

The flow of people between Hong Kong and Vancouver will be worth watching as the former British colony offers a new one-year work visa in a bid to repatriate its diaspora population. But the Special Administrative Region of China, inadvertently and counterproductively, has been sending that community mixed messages.

VICTORIA — When Ombudsman Jay Chalke was handed the job of investigating those botched firings in the health ministry this week, he offered multiple assurances to the public that his office would do its best to get to the bottom of the murky affair. “I am committed to a diligent and professional investigation into this matter,” he vowed in a statement issued by his office after a legislature committee referred the matter to him.